Roger Altizer, Ph.D.

Contact

Roger Altizer, Jr. (Rahjur) is the co-founder of the Entertainment Arts and Engineering Program at the University of Utah. He also co-founded an indie game co-op, Game Makers Anonymous, designed and developed indie and medical games, and spent a decade as a games journalist. He frequently is a guest commentator on games issues both locally and nationally and has presented his games research at international conferences. He has also appeared in a Penny Arcade comic and has had his work appear on G4’s Attack of the Show.

When not teaching, studying, or making games he enjoys the rare occasion to play them, preferably with friends. Roger got his start as a video game tester.

Game Makers Anonymous – http://www.gamemakersanonymous.com/

Ryan Bown received his BFA in sculpture from Brigham Young University in 2008 and his MFA in Entertainment Arts and Engineering from the University of Utah in 2012. Prior to working in the games Industry he devoted a decade (1998-2008) to creating and showing Fine Art works at Galleries and Museums throughout the United States and abroad. Having a love for art and video games, he decided to fuse the two passions together. Over the past five years he has worked on half a dozen published games which include EIRE and Disney Infinity. At the University of Utah he teaches modeling, texturing and Art in the Unreal Engine.

More at http://ryanbown.org/resume.html

Ryan Bown, MFA

Assistant Professor, Game Art and Technical Art

Contact

Ashley Brown, Ph.D.

Contact

Moving from across the Atlantic, Dr. Ashley Brown recently joined the EAE teaching faculty in Autumn 2016. She previously taught at Brunel University London in the United Kingdom. Ashley’s teaching focuses are on user experience and design and her research interests include emergent gamelay. She has many publications which can be viewed here.

Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera is an Assistant Professor of the School of Computing and the Entertainment Arts and Engineering Program. He researches technologies to improve game design and development through artificial intelligence. Rogelio has been a recipient of the National GEM Fellowship, the Department of Energy’s Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, and in 2017 was recognized as a “New and Future Educator in AI” by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Rogelio has published at diverse, high-impact venues in and around intelligent narrative technologies, and his work has been recognized with a Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) in 2012, a Best Student Paper on a Cognitive Science Topic at the Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative in 2012, and an Honorable Mention for Best Paper at the ACM Computer-Human Interaction Conference in 2016. Rogelio received his B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez and has interned as a computational narratologist at Sandia National Laboratories and Disney Research.

Rogelio Cardona-Rivera

Assistant Professor, School of Computing and Entertainment Arts and Engineering Program

Bob Kessler, Ph.D.

Contact

There is just too much to say about Bob. You owe it to yourself to meet him.

Mark Christensen van Langeveld received his B.S. degree from Brigham Young University in 1985, his M.A. in Design at the University of California Los Angeles in 1990, his M.B.A from Northwestern University in 1999, his M.S.E in Computer Graphics and Game Technology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2005, and his Ph.D. in Computing at the University of Utah in 2009. His dissertation was on “The Educational Impact of Digital Visualization Tools on Digital Character Production Computer Science Courses” and his doctoral research was on Entertainment Arts and Engineering Interdisciplinary Education. His industry experience included designing and directing interactive music videos for Sting and Peter Gabriel, working on several AAA video games in varied rolls, and designing and directing the first major interactive TV (I-TV) show at Microsoft that was called Vine Street. His passion is to teach in the intersection of art and engineering.

Michael Young

Contact

We are so happy to have game scholar and designer Jose Zagal for the 20146-17 academic year! Jose comes to us from DePaul University, where he is an Assistant Professor of Game Development, Human Computer Interaction, Interactive Media in the School of Cinema and Interactive Media. Jose has many publications and research projects under his belt, click here to learn more.

Associate Instructors

Matthew Anderson, MFA

Contact

Matthew Anderson is currently a Lead Designer at React Games, and in the past was a designer at Wyrd Miniatures, co-founded Cobalt Flux, and was an MFA recipient at the University of Utah. He has done extensive work to promote video games as a viable tool in physical education and therapy, and has co-developed hardware and software utilized by thousands of schools nationally and internationally. At Wyrd, he co-designed several international best-selling tabletop and pen-and-paper RPG titles, including the second edition of the hit miniatures game Malifaux. Products originated at his company Cobalt Flux have been featured in Wired, PSM, the New York Times, and on Good Morning America. His mobile game Catball Eats it All was a recipient of three “Staff Favorites” front page features from Apple.

More coming soon!

Joe Barnes

Robin Conover

Industry Instructor, Technical Art and Motion Capture

Contact

A games industry veteran, Jon has been making digital entertainment for more than twenty-five years. He has an impressive depth of experience, including as an independent game developer, much-sought-after consultant and also as a production executive. Jon was Vice-president and GM at the world’s #1 videogame company, Electronic Arts, and Executive Producer of many hit games for EA and EA Sports. He sits on several advisory boards for technology companies and universities in the USA and regularly speaks at conference about videogames, freemium, the gaming industry and game production process. Jon is also a founder of UDEN, a new digital media trade association, the Utah Digital Entertainment Network.

Jon has produced more than 250 game titles across all major gaming platform including consoles, handhelds and mobile. Visit www.guv1.com for more information about Jon.

Paul Mattson

Contact

Joe Olson

Contact

Joe Olson is a game industry veteran of over 10 years. His published games include Disney Infinity, Epic Mickey, as well as Tak and Tak 2. Joe specializes in art direction, digital painting, concept art, environmental art, texturing, and 2D illustration. he has a BFA from Brigham Young University where he has also taught illustration and digital art courses.

Contact

Affiliated Instructors

Cem Yuksel, Ph.D.

Contact

Cem Yuksel joined the University of Utah as a USTAR faculty following his two year postdoc at Cornell University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Texas A&M University in 2010. He has a BS in Physics and MS in Computer Engineering from Bogazici University in Turkey.

His primary research focus is computer graphics. Within graphics he has a wide range of research interests, including physically based simulations, rendering and simulation of natural phenomena, global illumination and realistic rendering algorithms, GPU computation, high performance rendering and simulation for real-time graphics, as well as core graphics techniques, such as texture mapping and 3D model representations.

Cem Yuksel also developed Hair Farm, a leading graphics software for modeling, animating, and rendering hair, fur, and other strand based structures. Hair Farm is being used by numerous artists and production studios all over the world.